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Arthur Wing Pinero
(born in 1855, knighted in 1909, died in 1934) came from
Islington, left school at 10 and was apprenticed to the law.
But amateur acting was his passion; and at the age of 19 he turned
professional. His first job
(salary: £1 a week) was as ‘general utility’ man at the Theatre Royal,
Edinburgh. He took a room in a
cheap temperance hotel, but soon found that it was beyond his means:
‘A
young actor, a good simple fellow, with whom I formed firm
friendship, gave me further enlightenment by informing me that only
“stars”—eminent artists who traveled from town to town, who played leading
Shakespearian characters, and were therefore enormously wealthy—ever thought
of putting up at hotels, and that the ordinary actor invariably dwelt in a
modest lodging under the watchful care of a landlady whose views of the
theatrical profession were broad and generous.
To a suitable lodging I was speedily inducted by G---- . . . For eight
months I was a lodger at Balaclava Place; it was there I was happier
than any king in history, richer than any South African billionaire of today.
O busy, cheerful, healthful times! . . .’
He was to recall and recreate these happy times more than twenty years
later: ‘Trelawny of the
“Wells”’ is Pinero’s tribute to Balaclava Place.
After ten years as an actor, he made his name as a playwright with a
series of popular farces: ‘The Magistrate’ (1885), ‘The Schoolmistress’ (1886),
‘Dandy Dick’ (1887). Then,
responding to the Ibsenite revolution that was shaking the European theatre, he
took the town with ‘The Second Mrs. Tanqueray’ (1893)—drawing-room Ibsen,
tamed and diluted to fashionable taste, but a genuine step forward for the West
End theatre of its day. ‘The Nororious Mrs. Ebbsmith’ followed in 1895:
another popular ‘play of ideas.’
‘Trelawny of the “Wells”’ opened at the Royal Court Theatre on
January 20, 1898, with a cast including Irene Vanbrugh (Trelawny), Gerald du
Maurier (Ferdinand Gadd) and Dion Boucicault, son of the famous Irish
playwright, as Sir William Gower. It
ran for 135 performances. Tom
Wrench, the idealistic young author, was immediately recognized as an
affectionate portrait of Tom Robertson, the pioneer of domestic realism, whose
‘cup-and-saucer drama’ had saved the British theatre of the 1860s from total
surrender to farce, melodrama and melodramatised Shakespeare.
(Pinero conceivably saw himself as the Robertson of the 90s).
Even Bernard Shaw, who had savaged Pinero’s more serious work, was won
over by the play’s craftsmanship and perfect sense of period.
In ‘Our Theatres in the Nineties’ he says that it touched him ‘more
than anything else Mr. Pinero has ever written.’
With Pinero the would-be modernist Shaw had no patience, but:
‘When
he plays me the tunes of 1860, I appreciate and sympathize.
Every stroke touches me: I
dwell on the dainty workmanship shown in the third and fourth acts:
I rejoice in being old enough to know the world of his dreams.’
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